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Compiz

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After about a day of using compiz I have to say this is one of the coolest things I've ever used. I've never been much of one to highly customize my desktop, but that is now a thing of the past.

I have transparency on several levels, the ability to use up to 36 different workspaces and switch between them by hitting ctrl -> alt -> and holding down my left mouse button, or ctrl -> alt -> left or right arrow. I can also use video on mydesktop if I want to, however, that's something I won't use as it's just a waste of resources as far as I'm concerned.

I normally use 8 workspaces and when I drag them around with the mouse I have an octagon that twirls around on my desktop and which I can almost do a complete roll from front to back on the screen as well as side to side. I can also alter the level of transparency/opacity of application windows with alt -> mouse wheel and zoom windows in and out with the windows key and the mouse wheel. The transparency of the octagon made of the 8 workspaces I is adustable to that when I spin it I can see the other sides of the octagon and look down inside it from both top and bottom. This is just way beyond cool. It makes Vista's aero effects look really sad in comparison. And, I am running this on a AMD Athlon XP 1800+ with a 4x AGP Geforce 6200 video card. It's responsive too. So, all this is running on hardware technology that is probably about 4 or 5 years old already.

I also have many choices of themes and reflections. The reflections are really cool. When the cube/octagon spins you can see the reflections of it on the screen below it. The themes are really slick too. The emerald theme manager is just really cool.

I gotta tell you Windows guys, you're getting left behind, and big time, in the technology race. Linux and Mac are eating Windows for lunch. I've barely begun to really scratch the surface of what all can be done with compiz yet too. There are just so many options that it takes a few days to really get the hang of this, and compiz is under heavy development. It's growing in capability all the time.

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I just really like the multiple workspaces in Gnome, and to a lesser degree those in KDE too. I can have a browser open in one, a bash prompt open in another, a file browser open in a third, an email client in a fourth, listen to music from a fifth, use the sixth for security apps, the seventh and eighth for office applications and a game. I don't have a whole mess of stuff open in the bar at the bottom, and since I use the same workspace for the same application type every time I can just click on that workspace and I'm there.

It just gets really confusing to have that many apps open in Windows after using multiple workspaces for so long. Everything gets so crowded that it's impossible to tell which minimized window belongs to which app.

Here's a screen shot with a transparent Google page, a semi-transparent Compiz effects manager window, and a fully opaque Gimp tools window. It doesn't allow you to really see the reflections or watch a window shake like jelly when it's moved, or see it deform as you grab it to slide it to another workspace until it finally lets go and then bounces around like a bowl of jello. The effects just are really cool.

Oh, that's the other thing, I can split a single application page between two workspaces too. There's just too many effects to list, and it's possible to combine several of them together at the same time to create something any of them couldn't create by itself.

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